The Golden State Warriors’ 2015-’16 season is over. There will be no sports miracle. No Gibson limping and arm pumping around the bases, no Hail Flutie, no Kerri Strug sticking it on one good ankle, no Nicklaus at the ‘86 Masters, no Music City Miracle, no bloody sock, no Federer/Nadal to the midnight hour in ’08, no NC State at the buzzer for Jimmy V., no Bumgarner out of the bullpen in the 5th to close down game seven…no Michael Vick barebacking his way through greater ATL using the moniker Ron Mexico.

It’s done. The team is out of steam. They have been playing playoff-caliber basketball for the last season and a half renewing faith in the extra pass, help side defense, the triangle offense and pure shooting—only to to jump back into the phone booth and do a reverse Superman to become a slower version of the Miami Heat during the last eight quarters. They are mentally, physically…and, most notably, spiritually exhausted.

And that’s OK.

Even if the Warriors were to come back from an improbable impossible triple match point deficit to take one from the league’s most energized franchise, Oklahoma City at home Thursday, it doesn’t matter.

They are a team destined to bow out before their time.

There will be talk about a dynasty unfulfilled and there will be an entire off-season of second-guessing everything from second-year coach Steve Kerr’s inability to rotate to keep his stars fresh in winning time to the emergence of The Lacob Curse, which owner Joe put into motion when he was quoted in the NYT earlier this season: “We’ve crushed them on the basketball court, and we’re going to for years because of the way we’ve built this team. We’re light-years ahead of probably every other team in structure, in planning, in how we’re going to go about things. We’re going to be a handful for the rest of the N.B.A. to deal with for a long time.”

Fucking asshole.

So yes, the Warriors will go from the GOAT to the goats and become one of the great teams alongside the 1906 Cubs, the ‘54 Indians, the ‘63 Yankees…basically all the Bills teams in the ‘90s and the ‘07 and ‘11 Patriots—as franchises of destiny who did not win.

But that’s all right.

It’s OK because, for you and me—it doesn’t matter. And I know that’s what the losing side says. But it really doesn’t. Whether the 16-month Warriors run ends Thursday in Oakland or Saturday in OKC, the game, their destiny at this point—in spite of what Steph Curry says—is out of their hands.

Win or lose, Warriors fans need to reconcile that a fascist, antichrist, morally if not literally bankrupt trust-funded sociopath former reality TV star carnival barking failed steak huckster with digits the size of Jelly Bellies is a major party candidate for leader of the free world.

American banks have been benefiting from cheap credit, falsely inflated credit ratings, financial incentives to take risks with your hard-earned dollar to continue to prop up a staggeringly untenable economy for the few. All this is AFTER 2008 when they got a $700 fucking billion bailout for gambling your money away on packaging bad loans.

Profitmaking machines like giant tech companies—Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, Facebook—are able to take government grants and tax incentives for long periods of unprofitable times to develop technology and then when they finally do make money, the beneficiaries are the few top shareholders, not the taxpayers who propped them up. All this as 45 million Americans, the majority of whom are working, live at or below the poverty line.

Humans are bringing themselves so close to total environmental annihilation the civilization may not be around in 50 years to remember the Warriors. Right now on several continents—Australia, Asia, Africa and South America—societies are breaking down and beginning to wage wars over the impacts of over-mining, over-drilling, and over onset disease and famine.

In less than 20 years an estimated 300 million people will be misplaced or face certain doom because of a water shortage. The ice caps will continue to melt at a rate unmatched in all of recorded history, combined. And in the U.S. we continue to burn 378 fucking million gallons of fuel every day for personal vehicles and, at the same time, we live in the only developed nation that does not have a national policy for restricting this use, that doesn’t have renewable energy goals—and no candidate, from either party, is addressing this as an issue.

So there you go. Like Golden State, we’re pretty much fucked either way. The difference the Warriors and their otherworldly run made is, for 48 minutes a night, some of us forget about all this other stuff.

Maybe now is a good time to remember that the Warriors had a commanding 60-47 lead at halftime game one against the Thunder. Great teams close. Great teams flex their best finishing move at the right time. Great teams learn from past mistakes and know how to put their opponent down (at home). The Warriors did not. They did not heed the signals. They got complacent while another caught fire. As a result, the Thunder did not go away.

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[…] I’ve written about it before but Warriors’ owner Joe Lacob’s hubris got the best of him when he was quoted in NYT Magazine earlier this season saying things like: “The great, great venture capitalists who built company after company, that’s not an accident. And none of this is an accident, either.” And, “We’ve crushed them on the basketball court, and we’re going to for years because of the way we’ve built this team. We’re light-years ahead of probably every other team in structure, in planning, in how we’re going to go about things. We’re going to be a handful for the rest of the N.B.A. to deal with for a long time.” […]

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